It’s been three days since I have been able to post anything to Homeland Stupidity. Fortunately, this isn’t because I got shipped off to Guantanamo. There’s been plenty of news, though, so I wanted to explain what has been going on behind the scenes.

As you may know, this site does not run on a typical web hosting service, subject to the whims of a hosting provider which tends to take down high traffic or controversial content if you wave papers with special words in their faces, or if they just feel like your site is using more than its fair share of resources.

Homeland Stupidity runs on a dedicated server which does little except serve out web pages and the occasional DNS request. Every other service, such as e-mail and backup DNS, runs on a second server in a separate data center. This setup has evolved over time to meet various challenges such as distributed denial of service attacks, the Slashdot effect, and so on.

On Thursday, the setup evolved a little further. I brought up a new server in a third location, the purpose of which is to store off-site backups of the other two servers and monitor them for any trouble. In the event that anything were to happen to either of the other two servers, such as a software crash, hardware failure or overzealous bureaucrats who don’t let the lack of probable cause stop them, this third server will notify me almost immediately, allowing me to restore normal services within as little as a few minutes, or from 4 to 24 hours in some of the worst-case scenarios.

Unfortunately, it took much longer to bring up the server and its new services than I’d planned. I originally figured it would take most of Thursday and part of Friday. Instead, it took from Thursday morning until earlier tonight to get everything set up and tested. I won’t bore you with all the technical details, but I will say that I did have to work around one bit of faulty hardware in the new server, which caused part of the delay. But most of the problem was that I could have planned it better. There was simply much more to do in bringing up this set of services than I’d planned for.

What’s done is done, though. Now, you have an extra level of assurance that Homeland Stupidity will remain online, come what may, and that even some of the worst possible things I can imagine will not keep it down for long. There are still a few changes to make behind the scenes, but they aren’t critical to providing the services, and I’m far enough behind as it is, so they can wait.

Normal posting, with the liberty-loving look at government stupidity you’ve come to know and love — or hate — will resume tomorrow afternoon, after I catch up on actually reading the news, and perhaps sleep.